The latest Hunger Games film, Mockingjay – Part 1, is topping the international box office. Although it’s a Hollywood blockbuster aimed at young adults, it presents potentially quite subversive ideas of…

At the top of Wencelas Square on the front of the Czech National Museum in Prague hangs a giant poster depicting the playwright dissident and former president Vaclav Havel. The poster has been hung, in…

The protests in Thailand are the latest spasm in a long struggle.
PADecember 6, 2013

There has been much coverage of Thailand’s protests, with stories of the Yellow Shirt (PAD) and Red Shirt (UDD) saga popping up around the globe. Yet there is a conspicuous lack of discussion about what…

Why do states and societies collapse? Efforts to explain the hugely complicated conflicts in Syria and Libya have understandably placed heavy emphasis on these nations’ ethnic or tribal diversity. Writers…

Few would argue the world isn’t facing enormous challenges: human population growth and the associated demand for resources, mass extinctions or – perhaps the biggest of all – global climate change. We…